Christine Flowers: The danger in pulling the R' card on opposing views

I love it when readers respond to the meandering stream of my consciousness. I particularly love it when they take the time to use correct grammar, look up the editorial desk’s email address and shoot off what was once a long and laborious effort including quill pens and parchment but is now executed with the push of a button: a Letter to the Editor.

This past year has been a mixed bag in terms of the letters inspired by my musings. Some of you like what I have to say and aren’t shy about expressing it. Others, a seeming majority, are regularly outraged and are equally if not more motivated to tell the world (or Delco) that the apocalypse has come and it’s in the form of a 5 foot 2 brunette.

It’s all good, people. At least you’re reading.

One of you was reading my recent column about affirmative action and didn’t like what you saw. Lynn Wlidaryczk, a fan from Delaware, penned a response to my “flippant” handling of Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent on this term’s case about race in college admissions. Lynn didn’t seem to have an issue with my legal reasoning. She (or possibly he, tricky little reader!) thought I showed disrespect to Justice Sonia, the self-styled Wise Latina.

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And maybe I was a little, shall we say, juvenile in my terminology. I don’t do that bowing and scraping before authority too well, even though I should.

But Lynn took it a step further and called me racist. That is a bit ironic in a piece that dealt with affirmative action, which is just a tidy euphemism for reverse racism.

It is a dangerous thing when the knee-jerk response to views with which we disagree is to pull out the race card, when that other “R” card, the “rude” one is much more appropriate. We may not like the way someone says something and we may even despise the subject matter that’s communicated, but calling someone a racist carries with it an obligation: to prove the actual discrimination in both intent and impact.

I would suggest that criticizing a Supreme Court justice who happens to have made her ethnicity a primary selling point during the nomination process is not racism. It’s called being observant and consistent, and calling on that jurist for accountability.

Of course, that takes a little bit of time and thought, and requires some surgical examination of the objectionable speech. With all due respect to those who find the race card to be particularly potent, there are very few cases when racism can be extracted from sentiments that attack the continued necessity got that level playing field. It is also not homophobic (another favorite Christine descriptor) to oppose same sex marriage on legal principle.

And since we’re on the hyperbole topic, let’s clear this up once and for all: Being a Catholic woman is not tantamount to engaging in masochism and supporting the rights of the unborn does not make one a warrior against women. Oh, and just because I think young men on campus deserve due process does not mean I want to give them carte blanche to rape and pillage the coeds.

All I’m asking for is a bit of sobriety, here. You can still think conservative views are repellent, but it’s intellectually lazy to call a disagreement racist (except when it is). You can still think that liberals are clueless as long as you can do more than just chant the word “Benghazi” ten thousand times

I am sure there are racists. In fact I know there are. I’ve been at gatherings where racist, hurtful and anti-Semitic things have been said. And I had a father who was called a (racially offensive slur) for registering black voters in the south.

Calling a legal disagreement “racist” dishonors those who have both suffered from, and fought against, that disease.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Sunday, and occasionally on Friday. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com.